Isaac spoke to them like you’d speak to drunk friends. “Come on now, guys. Heads up.” He wasn’t particularly fond of animals. This made me feel stronger than him. I’d pulled out eighty lambs. I’d thrown maggots out of sheep’s feet with pungent oil, I’d clipped their wool and bandaged their cuts with cobwebs. I was proud of who I was on the farm. I wanted Isaac to understand how this, too, was happiness.

* * *

“You two seem to have hit it off quite nicely,” Osha said as we set the table for dinner. I squinted at her, unsure if she’d guessed our secret. “Oh yeah, well,” I said. “Durham—we know some of the same people.” I felt like I’d already revealed too much. I wondered what punishment I’d face if Dice learned that Isaac was a fake-world friend of mine. But as long as I let Dice blaze through me like a current, I told myself, as long as I let him direct me, I’d be all right, I’d protect myself by doing exactly what he wanted.

Osha set down the gray crockery. “Do you think he’ll stay on?” I followed with the forks and spoons. They were prison-issue, the kind you can bend in half. “He seems like he’s here for a laugh,” she said.

I was defensive. “In what way?”

“Some people come looking for a family. Some come just to imagine what it’d be like if they were different. You know, mooning around.”

“Isaac is a very serious person. He’s very antiauthoritarian,” I said. “So, you know—” And I stopped short. Dice was an authority. So was hating authority a good or bad trait in an Asher? I shook my head to clear it.

“Yes,” said Osha gently. “Rebels often do well here.”

We continued around the table in silence. I asked, “Should I try to convince him to stay?”

“You should be as kind and welcominray diamond frost sparkled on the yarg as you always are.”

For dinner we ate green tomatoes and pestilent cabbages, lye hominy soaked in yesterday’s ashes, and pawpaws for dessert. We formed our chairs into the hollow square for the shape-note singing.

We sang 162, “Plenary,” which was the same tune as “Auld Lang Syne” but made strange with wide-open harmonies.

Hark! From the tombs a doleful sound

Mine ears attend the cry

Ye living men come view the ground

Where you must shortly lie.

Rainer led, rubbing his eyes and holding his forehead, awkward. I didn’t feel envious of him anymore—imagining the family as we appeared to Isaac, I was proud of him, proud of everyone, in love with our communion. Isaac and I sat side by side, and the family sang loud enough to knock our hair back, loud enough to startle birds from the trees.